DIY Christmas baubles

I love Christmas! Always have. Even though we don't officially celebrate Christmas and have the whole family over for Christmas dinner or go to midnight mass or any of the other Christian things Christian people do during Christmas. I just love the whole aura of Christmas, the feeling of warmth, family and love this holiday brings.

So ever since my girls have been little, I've made it a point to have a tree and decorate it together, whether it was the awful plastic one we had in Switzerland when the girls were very little to the teeny tiny plastic one we had in the flat in Canada and now to the real ones we bring each year.

For the first Christmas we spend in Canada, I bought some Ikea christmas decorations and those were the ones we have used for the past 5 years. I still love those because they are really quite beautiful and not Ikea-y at all (to be fair, Ikea does have some pretty neat stuff!) but I thought it might be time to jazz things up a bit this year.

I had seen a tutorial for DIY Christmas ornaments using melted crayons but because of the terrible T3, I couldn't risk buying glass ones. So we got some plastic ones (cheaper than the glass) and did our project with acrylic paint.It's quite messy so you make sure to do it on a surface that is easily washable. I put my huge raw fabric dropcloth on the living room carpet and got to work.First put a teeny bit of water (a few drops will do) into the ornament, add bits of different coloured paints and then shake while sealing the opening of the ornament with your finger. Using the lid of the ornament itself to seal it doesn't really help because we found that bits of paint splashed out.

Don't shake too much though because that will completely mix the colours together and you'll be left with an even shade of the mixed colour whereas what makes this beautiful is when you can see all the different colours blending in and out of each other.Be very careful not to put too much water. We did that with a few of our ones and once they dried, there was hardly any paint visible - it had all dripped down to the bottom of the ornament.

If you feel the paint is quite runny to begin with, test it without the water. If it runs well along the insides of the ornament without the need for water, then don't add any.

Once you're done, leave the baubles to dry in front of a fan or hair dryer (careful if you're drying with heat because the plastic will melt if it gets too hot). Try to turn the ornaments from time to time so that the paint doesn't drip all to one side.

H1 and N2 had a blast. T3 off course wanted to do his share too so we filled one or two of the baubles with bits of paint and let him swish and shake it to his little heart's content.

Once the baubles were dry, we put the lids back on. I had bought some thin ribbon from Michaels in gold, silver and white which we used to make the hanging part. The only thing left to do was hang them and once that was done, our tree looked so much more colourful than before! Definitely better than buying ready made baubles from the store because you get to choose the colours you want and it was cheaper because I managed to buy both the ornaments and the ribbon at 60% off. And best of all, it was a fun project that the girls (and boy) and I got to do together.